Most conservatives don't see themselves as opponents of democracy — they see a democracy that has drifted from the values that make it legitimate. On this episode, Aaron Ross Powell talks with Scott Warren of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and Morgan Ramsey-Elliot of ReD Associates about their Liberalism.org essay "Can Democracy Survive if We Stand on Different Foundations?" and the ethnographic study behind it, for which researchers embedded for weeks in conservative communities in Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina. They discuss why "save democracy" messaging so often fails to land, the moral foundation of faith, family, freedom, and place against which these citizens judge their institutions, how everyday encounters with institutional failure erode trust from the local level upward, and the harder work of building institutions that people standing on genuinely different moral foundations can still recognize as legitimate.

Further Reading

• Can Democracy Survive if We Stand on Different Foundations? — Scott Warren & Morgan Ramsey-Elliot, Liberalism.org

• Faith, Freedom, Family, Place: An Ethnographic Study of Conservative Americans' Relationships to Democracy — SNF Agora Institute & ReD Associates

• Faith, Freedom, Family, Place (interactive study site) — ReD Associates

• Trump's Democrats — Stephanie Muravchik & Jon A. Shields, Brookings Institution Press

More from Liberalism.org

• Conservative Values, Trust, and the Prospects for Democratic Renewal — Emily Chamlee-Wright